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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Chew Chew Train, Part Two

Once before I wrote about being on a train and it was not a very great experience. In fact I would feel comfortable saying it was the opposite of great which is shitty. However, while on vacation I traveled by train from San Francisco all the way to Portland, Oregon. It was scheduled to be a 17 hour train ride which blossomed into a 25 hour train ride. It wasn't so bad because I had a first class ticket (I'm fancy) and my own private sleeping quarters. Meals were also included and they were served on real plates with real silverware and served by a real honest to goodness waitress that stepped right out of a television sitcom. You know of my love for Flo, Alice and Shirley and this waitress was like all three of them rolled into one snarky wise ass waitress. I never got her name, so I shall refer to her as Pearl.

Pearl was one of those waitresses who always has a quick comeback whenever you ask for anything and if she didn't say it with a smile and a wink you would just think she was a total bitch. I wanted to know what it was like to wait tables on a train and live in the same place that you work for days at a time. She told us that her days were 18 hours long and she worked three days in a row and then had six days off. As if waiting tables isn't hard enough, Pearl has to do it 18 hours at a time and on a train that sways back and forth as it rolls across the country. She was my new hero. I asked her how she managed to deal with such a crazy kind of job. Her answer: drugs. I just fell in love with her a little bit more. I think she meant something like Ambien or Prozac, but in my mind I imagined good ol' Pearl curled up in her sleeping quarters while sucking on a crackpipe and free basing some crystal meth before her breakfast shift.

By the end of my breakfast, she told me that her drugs had kicked in and she had a joke for me. "What do you call a cow eating grass?" she asked. In my world that would just be a hamburger, but she told me the answer was a "lawn mooer!" And then she busted out laughing like it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard. Hmm, maybe she really was on crack. Her joke led to a whole smorgasbord of bad jokes from every other table in the dining car. And here they are:

Q: What do you call a group of rabbits walking backwards?A: A receding hare line!

Q: What do you call a monkey with a time bomb?A: A baboom!

Q: What did the fish say when it swam into the wall?A: Dam!

Q: Why was six afraid of seven?A: Because seven ate nine!

Thank you, folks. I'm here all week. Try the veal.

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While reading your train-post, I remembered one incident of my life. A beggar once asked me while I was traveling on train one day: "Sir, can you tell me 100 words within 5 minutes those don't have an 'a'?" I became tensed. I couldn't tell the answer. The answer is: one to hundred!